Embarking On a Life-Changing Journey

Welcome to the family of Community Sponsorship in the UK!

This portal has been created to provide step by step guidance to the Community Sponsorship process, from filling in the Home Office application form to providing English classes and setting up bank accounts.

Each section contains a text that gives advice and guidance for the particular action with links to relevant videos, articles and platforms.

Below the text, you will find various resources from Sponsor Refugees and other organisations to fully equip your group to sponsor a family.

We recommend that all group members have access to this portal to enable everyone to contribute to the process and the application.

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about how to use this Portal.

A STEP BY STEP GUIDE?

We have designed these steps in the order that we recommend you travel through the Community Sponsorship process. But this will vary for each group, and you may want to jump forward or back to a particular chapter.

For example, we have assumed that you will send your application to the Home Office before you find a house for the resettled family. We recommend this order, so that you do not pay rent on an empty house while you are waiting to be approved.

But you may be fortunate to already have found a house, or perhaps you will find a house much earlier in your sponsorship journey. In this instance, you may need to move through the chapters in a different order.

Not all the chapters of this portal will be relevant to you. If you are the Designated Safeguarding Lead, for example, you may want to jump directly to our “Safeguarding” chapter in Section 3. Or if you are responsible for Benefits, our “Learning about the Benefits System” chapter will be most useful to you.

Useful Planning Tools:

As you go through the steps, we suggest using three useful tools:

Application Pack: We can share an online folder with all the resources you need in one place - such as template safeguarding policies; example application forms and template tenancy agreements.

Airtable - Checklists & Project Tracker: We've created a project tracker to keep all your task checklists, group contacts, budgets, etc in one place.

Slack: A brilliant way to keep in touch as a group.

See this section to get started.

See Community Sponsorship in Action: